


Tesselate

by sanidine



Series: Sunderer [4]
Category: WWE, World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, F/M, Flashbacks, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Kayfabe Compliant, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Substance Abuse, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-06
Updated: 2016-08-13
Packaged: 2018-07-29 16:09:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7691047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanidine/pseuds/sanidine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The waitress and the teenagers were still frozen in time, trapped in amber waiting for the scientists to come and extract their blood to clone the dinosaurs. Wait, what? Fuck, Dean was losing the thread. He had to focus on what mattered - Rollins had come to kick Dean’s ass in a Denny's, and even though Dean was still pretty fucked up he was going to tear Seth apart. Screw saving it for the cameras.</p><p>(Once someone spends enough time on the edges of society it's hard to avoid the glimpsing some secrets. Dean has been out on the fringe since he was born, but that doesn't necessarily make any it easier. The world is a weird and dangerous place. It's full of strange things that Dean doesn't understand, but he just wants to keep on living in it anyways.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Pure Intentions

**Author's Note:**

> You sorta need to read the other works in the series, some things won't make much sense if you haven't. I am going light on the tagging for this one because I don't want to spoil anything.

All that Dean wanted after the long flight was to keep on moving. To get on the road so that he could get to where he needed to be - if he got to the arena early enough he might be able to stretch out and catch some rest, especially since he was the champ and had his own dressing room now. 

Dean knew that he had earned it, but it was still a little ridiculous. How damn dressed did he need to be? It wasn't like he had an hours-long beauty routine like Breezango.

Unfortunately, being champ didn't mean that Dean got to be the first one off the airplane. Now Dean had been stuck standing in line at the rental car desk for what felt like hours, all the way at the end of the line behind AJ Styles. In fact, the only other person on the roster that was behind Dean was Baron Corbin. But where Corbin was at least silent and brooding, AJ would just not shut the fuck up about some dumbshit movie his kids had apparently just loved the tits off of. 

AJ had been trying to get buddy-buddy with Dean ever since the roster split had separated him from his Club. But AJ must have gotten some bad information somewhere, because talking incessantly about your family and showing off all the pictures in your wallet was just about the least effective way imaginable to get on Dean’s good side. Dean could picture Seth, eyes wide and earnest as he told AJ  _ ‘Great idea, appeal to his soft side. And definitely make sure he sees those cute pictures of your kids. There's nothing Ambrose loves more than hearing all about happy families.’ _

Alexa Bliss was sitting on one of the benches nearby, glaring down at her phone. Dean had just assumed that she was riding with Nia, who was in line ahead of AJ and was currently dealing with the clerk but watched out of the corner of his eye as Alexa got up and made her way over, taking a spot in line behind Corbin. 

Why had Dean been watching Bliss? Well, he had two eyes and a dick, didn't he? So sue him. Alexa Bliss was hot as hell, and she had the type of mean streak in her that Dean liked a little too much.

The line moved forward a step and then it was AJ’s turn at the desk. Thank God. Dean swore that if he heard AJ say one word to the clerk about his kids, about anything that wasn't about renting a car, then Dean was going to Dirty Deeds that southern asshole right onto the baggage claim belt. 

When he checked over his shoulder, Dean noticed that all of a sudden Baron Corbin wasn't looking so good. Corbin was paler than normal, almost a little green around the gills - sweaty, blinking a little too rapidly, clenching and unclenching his jaw. 

“You alright there hound dog?” Dean asked, mocking.

For once Corbin didn't rise to the bait. He just swallowed hard and muttered something under his breath before he hurried away, giving up his spot in line to Bliss. Those two had some kind of long standing secret feud, Dean was sure of it. He just hadn't managed to get anyone to spill the beans on what had happened between them.

“Now it's just you and me, sugar.” Dean grinned down at her. Way down. Damn, she was short.

Alexa just rolled her eyes, went back to looking at the calendar on her phone.

“Aww. What’s this? No love for the champ?”

“Fuck off.”

“Ouch. And here I was, gonna invite you back to my room and show you my shiny belt.”

“Not interested,” Alexa said, unbothered by Dean’s crude attempt to get under her skin “Unless I get to choke you out with it.”

Dean laughed, startled and genuine. He didn't miss the way that she smirked back before he had to spin around and take his turn at the service desk.

Even when Dean had finally gotten everything squared away he still had to wait for the shuttle to the rental car lot. And because God hated Dean, AJ was still hanging around wanting to tell Dean all about that movie with a talking fish who couldn't remember anything. As if that made it special. Dean bet it wouldn't take more than a few chair shots to the head before he could make any fish forget it's own name.

“They call me the fish ruiner.” Dean said, out of nowhere. 

That seemed to bother AJ for some reason, because AJ finally stopped talking. He scrutinized Dean for a minute, then took a very small step away. Good.

When Alexa came out the automatic doors she wasn't paying any attention to him, which. Yeah. Dean was into it. She was rolling her suitcase in front of her as she clipped  the car keys onto a carabiner at the end of a light blue lanyard. Alexa was close enough that Dean also saw that had her WWE company ID and a weird looking keychain dangling from it in the split second before she stuffed it all back into the pocket of her jeans. 

Dean had noticed it as random background information since he was really just trying to get a look at her ass. He was in the middle of trying to come up with a non creepy way to resume their previous conversation. To tell Alexa that he would, in fact, be very down to have her choke him a little bit. But then the shuttle showed up and Bliss took a seat far enough away that he would have had to shout it at her.  Dean wasn't exactly Mr. Tactful, but even he knew that would be  _ too _ weird.

It wasn't until the shuttle was merging out past the line of taxis that something shook the dust off of Dean’s brain. That keychain. 

Dean remembered it from somewhere. He had been -  Dean had been twelve years old and riding in the passenger seat of the social worker’s car. 

That wasn't where he had seen it, but that had been the start.

The lady had tried talking to him at first, but met with only sullen silence she had since stopped bothering and turned on the radio. One of Dean’s eyes had been swollen completely shut. The other one was bruised up too, but it wasn’t so bad that he couldn’t watch the tall buildings growing smaller and smaller behind him in the side mirror as they drove out of the city.

It was a Friday afternoon in October in Ohio. Fall already, cold enough that Dean should have been wearing at least a long sleeve shirt instead of the ragged tank top that he had bled all over before the cops had shown up to the apartment block where Dean and his mom were living. The social worker had riffled through everything he had in his half empty garbage bag of belongings, but none of it was in much better condition.

Dean had clenched his fists, kept his mouth shut - social workers didn’t usually steal your stuff. He just had to grit his teeth and bear it. To shut his goddamn mouth and not cry at the way that she was touching everything he had in the world as if it were trash.

He hadn’t wanted the too-large sweatshirt that she had fished out of the trunk of her car, but refusing it would have involved more talking so Dean just took it. Dean was secretly glad for it though, when they reached their destination and he ended up standing on the stoop of the house in the chill wind as the social worker went through his information with the foster parents.

“He’s just an emergency placement.” the social worker flipped through the papers on her clipboard “I’ll have him out of here before the courthouse opens on Monday.”

Dean could hide his hands up in the sleeves of the sweatshirt to cover his bruised knuckles and keep his fingers from shaking. The hood was big enough that he could pretend that the family couldn’t see his messed up face as the social worker handed over the paperwork and took off. 

It was never good to get dropped off with a bunch of obvious bruises, which Dean had learned because it was the only way he ever got an emergency placement. The adults would either pour their pity on to him or assume that he was a troublemaker. The other kids would zero in on the weakness as soon as they saw it. At twelve, Dean was just starting to get big enough to really defend himself. But he still hadn't really hit puberty yet, and there were plenty of older, larger kids out there who had no qualms against taking advantage of him if they thought he was an easy target.

And there were a  _ lot _ of other kids at this placement. The house was way on the outskirts of a suburb, at the end of a quiet culs-de-sac. Dean mostly ignored everything that the foster parents said to him, but he picked up that all the families on the block were either somehow related to each other or were best friends. When he got the grand tour Dean noticed that all of the backyards were open to each other - swingsets and a sandbox and an enormous, sprawling garden. 

Since school had been out for a couple of hours already, all the neighbor kids were running around between properties playing an intense looking game of tag that Dean wanted no part of. A lot of the kids that Dean saw had the same kind of white blonde hair as the foster parents, but there was enough diversity in the crowd for Dean to guess that a good portion of the kids he saw were permanent fosters.

The room that they led him to was small, but his was the only bed in it. The foster dad said something about the other kids sharing rooms but Dean getting his own since he would only be there a couple of days. He said it like it was a good thing, but it made Dean clutch his garbage bag a little tighter. Bad things happened in crowded rooms with other kids. Worse things could happen if you were alone and there was no one else to see.

“Would you like something to eat, Dean? Supper’s almost ready.”

“Ate in the car.” Dean lied, looking at the floor.

It was a bad lie, but neither one of them called him on it. They gave him a brand new toothbrush and toothpaste in a little zippered bag that said “Travel Kit,” and they told him he could keep it. Nobody yelled at him for closing the door to the room that he had been given (even if there wasn’t a lock). He knew that he wouldn’t be able to hide the entire weekend, but Dean had learned that he tended to have a little extra leeway in the first few hours after he was dropped off.

Dean stayed on edge as he listened to the sounds of the meal being served on the other side of the door, of some of the kids bickering over what to watch on the TV after the dishes were done. He heard four, maybe five different voices besides the parents. One of the kids, a young girl, asked a couple of times about the firmly shut door of the room that Dean was in even after the parents had given her the basics.

How old was the new kid? Where had he come from? What was his name? Was he a weirdo?

She asked that last one a couple of times, and the parents told her no again and again. Very firm about it, as if they knew Dean was listening and didn’t want him to get his feelings hurt. Dean tried not to laugh. He would be here for a couple more days, and if the worst thing someone did to Dean was call him weird then this would rocket up to the top of his foster homes list.

At some point the foster mom came by and knocked on his door to let him know that it was time for lights out. Dean shoved his garbage bag under the bed as far as he could before he flipped the switch. He didn't take of his ragged jeans or the baggy sweatshirt before he fell asleep curled in on himself with the toothbrush stashed under his pillow. It was a poor last line of defense, but it made him feel a little more protected against whatever might come for him in the night.

It ended up being useless, of course - Dean should have known better. 

Dean woke up flat on his back with a heavy weight on his chest and a hand pressed against his mouth. His own hands were trapped under the covers, and as Dean came awake he realized that they were being pinned down by the knobby knees of the little girl who was crouched over him.

Dean took a deep breath in through his nose. Didn’t move.

She looked a lot younger than Dean. Six, maybe seven years old. Her age didn’t make Dean feel any better though, especially paired with the look of intense concentration on her face as she stared him down. As his good eye adjusted to the darkness Dean saw that she was wearing a set of faded pajamas with cartoon cats on them, her pale blonde hair pulled back in a frizzy ponytail. 

If Dean was right and she was one of the foster family’s bio kids then he was really in trouble. What could he do if she did something to him? Fight back and risk hurting her? Yell for help? Dean had never believed in fairy tales or miracles. He knew how the real world worked.

He was breathing harder all of a sudden, chest heaving under where her little butt was perched on his ribs. Her mouth set in a determined little line and she shifted more of her weight up onto her knees, sharp bones that pressed Dean’s hands harder into the bed and made him yelp against her palm. She was holding something in the hand that wasn’t clamped over Dean’s mouth, and his eyes went wider and wider was she bought it down towards his face.

“Don’t. Scream.” She whispered, and then she pressed her hovering hand to Dean’s forehead.

Dean held his breath but nothing happened. The girl wasn’t hurting Dean, just holding something that felt like a big flat coin against the skin above his eyebrows. She waited five, ten seconds. Dean knew how long it was because the girl was counting under her breath and not looking happy about it. Then she took her hands off of Dean, his mouth and his forehead, and rolled off of him to land crouched on the floor on silent, socked feet.

“Sorry Dean.” she whispered.

Dean sat up as soon as he could, getting tangled in the sheets as he tried to swing his feet off the bed to face her. He knew that his face had to be furious and scary, but the little girl didn’t look bothered at all.

“What the fuck?” He whispered back, his heart still hammering in his chest

“That’s a bad word.” She rolled her eyes at him “You’re gonna get in trouble.”

“What did you do to me?” Dean tried again, nicer this time as he realized that she could very well still rat Dean out to her parents for cussing without getting into trouble for, you know. Attacking him in the middle of the night.

“Mom and Dad said you wasn’t weird but I hadta see for myself.”

“What?”

The girl held out the hand that she had pressed to Dean’s forehead, and he got a quick glance of what she was holding before she stuffed it in one of the pockets of her cat pajamas. It was a little disk, about twice the size of a quarter and divided into four sections. Two sections were grey metals - one was shinier than the other - and one section was wood. The last looked sort of like glass but it was webbed with cracks like a windshield that had been hit by a rock.   

“Don’t tell.” She said, looking very serious. It was Dean’s turn to roll his eyes.

“Fine. What’s your name, anyways?”

“Alexa. You gonna make pumpkins with us tomorrow?”

“Sure.” Dean agreed, not knowing or caring what ‘making a pumpkin’ meant. “Can you go away now?”

“Okay.” The girl nodded at him and smiled for the first time in the entire encounter before she snuck out of the room, as silent as the grave.

Dean didn't think he would sleep again for the rest of the night, but he was worn down and exhausted by hunger and the hours of pain and uncertainty and fear that had defined his day.   He was still tired the next morning, but Dean wasn't allowed to stay hidden away in the room anymore. This family was one of the only ones that he had ever stayed with that actually succeeded as treating him like any other kid. Everyone got toast and eggs and a piece of bacon, everyone had to wash their hands in the sink, everyone sat at the same table to eat. It made Dean uncomfortable. 

“Dean’s gonna help me with my chores!” Alexa announced once she had finished her food, short legs swinging and kicking against the chair since she was too little to put her feet on the floor.

“Did you ask him?”

“No.” She replied, sullen for a second before she turned to Dean and smiled the type of smile that let Dean know what she expected of him. “Dean do you wanna help with me chores?”

“Sure.” Dean mumbled, stuffing the last bite of toast in his mouth as he hunched over his plate.

“You know, you don't have to do everything that Little Miss Bossy here tells you.”

“Shut  _ up _ , Micah.”

Micah was older than Dean, one of the bigger kids in the house. He was also definitely one of the adopted ones unless the foster mom had an affair with a black guy. It was nothing for Micah to reach down and scoop the little girl up under her armpits, to lift her up out of the chair. Dean went very, very still but all Micah did was swing Alexa around a little bit while she scowled and twisted in his arms.

“That’s right! I'm gonna put a loudspeaker on my truck and drive around -”

“Put me down! Micah! Put me down put me down put me down -”

“- and I'm gonna make sure everyone knows what a little turd you are.”

Dean wasn't sure exactly how she did it, but Alexa managed to use her swinging momentum to twist around in her brother's grip. She lashed out and hit Micah in the face, a quick strike with the heel of her hand that cracked him right in the mouth.

“Dad!” Micah squawked, dropping Alexa.

The girl landed on her feet and stuck her tongue out at her brother before she scampered over to hide behind Dean. Dean was rooted in the chair, petrified, eyes glued to his empty plate as he tried not to puke. 

“She did tell you to put her down, Micah.” was all that the foster dad said. When Dean dared to glance up the man didn't look mad, just preoccupied with wiping the face of a little boy in a highchair.

“Yeah!” Alexa yelled “I wish you were a werewolf so I could shoot you in the face!”

“Hey!” Both parents said it at one, and their voices had the exact same firm tone. “Apologize to you brother.”

“Sorry Micah.” Alexa actually did sound sorry for a second as she looked down at her shoes.

“Thanks, Alexa. I know you didn't mean it.”

“No. I meant it. If you were a werewolf I  _ would _ shoot you in the face, but I just don't wanna have to.”

“ _ Alexa _ .”

Dean felt himself break out into goosebumps as the mood in the room suddenly shifted. No one had been that bothered by the sibling scuffle, but now everyone was staring at Alexa as she shuffled her feet beside Dean. All of her older siblings and her parents were giving her a hard look. Dean was used that look, and it made his blood run cold. He didn't want to see this little girl get roughed up the way that Dean did whenever someone looked at him like that. But nothing like that happened.

Alexa just muttered another apology, sounding significantly less sorry than she had before, but the tension deflated. Things went back to how they had been before the outburst, and Dean was left feeling unsettled and confused.

Once breakfast was over and the dishes were in the sink, Alexa grabbed Dean’s hand and drug him out into the yard. The ground was wet with morning dew, soft and unsteady under Dean’s uncertain feet as Alexa held his hand and led him along.

He didn't want to touch her at all - physical contact was so rarely a good thing for Dean. Even if it seemed safe, like a hug or holding hands, it almost always got him hurt. Not to mention that Dean still had the memory of her hand pressing down over his mouth as she told him not to scream. Dean snatched his hand away a couple of times, but she grabbed it again and again and her grip was surprisingly strong so eventually he just gave up and just let her hold it and pull him along.

It turned out that there was a big chicken coop at the back of the property. Dean had thought that it was just a shed until they got close enough to hear clucking - he had never seen chickens in real life. Not unless they were the nuggets he got at school. He followed Alexa through the door, squinting as his eyes adjusted. The inside of the chicken coop was dim and stuffy and it smelled a little bit like corn flakes.

“You gotta get all the eggs while I write the special names.” Alexa instructed, holding a big green piece of chalk in one fist as she handed Dean a bucket.

Turned out, Dean by far preferred chickens as nuggets. He was creeped out by their beady little eyes and sharp beaks, the way that they puffed up and swiveled their heads to watch Dean as he tried to figure out where the eggs were and how he was supposed to get them. It made Dean feel stupid and useless, that he couldn't even manage something a little kid had told him to do. But he also didn't want to touch the chickens or, even worse, get within striking distance of the big black rooster. 

He ended up just watching as Alexa drew chalk scribbles on the walls, tracing over the blurry markings that she had probably put there the day before. She wasn't even writing real letters, much less names, but she was doing it with the single minded focus of a little kid who thought that what they were doing was the most important thing in the world at that moment.

When she got done with her drawing Alexa finally noticed that Dean had yet to collect a single egg. Heaving a put-upon sigh, she snatched the bucket out of his hand and filled it in about three minutes flat. Alexa wasn't even that much bigger than the rooster, but when it started strutting towards her she just whacked it away without seeming to spare a second thought for the wicked looking spurs on the back of it's scaly feet.

She handed the bucket back to Dean who just stared down at it. Impatient, Alexa shoved it against his hip.

“You gotta carry it at least since I did all the work.  _ Geez _ .”

Alexa was small and bossy and kind of a pain in the ass. She got on his nerves like crazy. Dean kind of liked her for it. 

Later that night the whole family got together and processed a bunch of pumpkins, people swarming everywhere in the kitchen and Dean doing his best to stay out of the way and not freak out at all the noise and activity. But he was expected to help, and Alexa grabbed him by the hand again to show him what to do. 

Cut the pumpkin in half, scrape out the stinking, stringy fibers and the seeds. Seeds got saved, but the rest of it got dunked in the garbage. Then the pumpkin would get passed off to the adults and teenagers who were handling the part of the process that involved the hot ovens in the kitchen. 

Dean got stuck on seed picking duty with Alexa. He figured at first that it was because he had a note in his file about being untrustworthy with knives. But maybe it was just because he still had smaller fingers than a lot of the older kids, because when it came time for everyone to carve a few pumpkins for fun they handed him a knife without seeming to think twice about it.

Dean had never carved a pumpkin before. He was terrible at it, but it was still nice. 

At one point he got frustrated and carried away and flicked some pumpkin guts on another kid. Dean didn't even remember the kid's name, but he had said that Dean’s pumpkin looked like crap and Dean had seen red. He was trying his best. Even if he was bad at everything, even if his best wasn't good enough, at least he was trying.

Dean and the other kid both got sent to their rooms until they had cooled down. But the foster parents didn't hit Dean or lock him in there all night. Dean still got to eat supper and his pumpkin was put out on the porch with the rest of them, lopsided grin and all.

Alexa’s strange nighttime ambush had been almost entirely forgotten by the time the social worker picked Dean up. It wasn't like that was the first weird thing that had happened to him in the foster care system. It wasn't the last either, although by the time Dean turned fourteen he finally learned to make himself scarce before CPS arrived.

Decades later, Dean’s strongest memories of that weekend had been that no one had hurt him, and he had gotten to carve a pumpkin. 

That was, at least, until he saw the keychain dangling from Alexa’s lanyard. 

It was maybe a quarter inch thick, a flat circle divided into four quarters. Two of the quarters that were opposite from one another were grey metal, although they looked slightly different and one was shinier than the other. Another one of the sections was polished wood. The fourth was thick plastic, maybe glass, and it looked like it was broken. Webbed with cracks, like a windshield that had been hit by a rock.

It hadn't meant anything to Dean at the time. He still didn't know what it was. Not really, not in any way that he could have put into words. But the loose bits of information were starting to come together.  Alexa as a child, earnestly reassuring her brother that she would kill him if he turned into a werewolf. The incident with Seth at the Denny's after Seth had destroyed the SHIELD. The hundreds of strange things that Dean had witnessed on the road, in the alleys behind dive bars and in the locker rooms after shows.

Oh.  _ Fuck _ .


	2. Birth of Serpents

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional warnings: Barebacking, felching

The motel Dean had been living in was close enough to the interstate that the road noise was pretty much constant. The high whine of the cars and the lower bass of tractor trailers as they rumbled across the overpass. Dean had actually liked it, and not just because it meant that the rooms were cheaper than average.

All the background noise from outside helped Dean remember that the world still existed. That there was life out there even when Dean felt like the last bacteria in the autoclave. But on the night in question the sounds of the road had been playing second fiddle to the smack of skin on skin, heavy breathing. Seth's needy little gasps, and Dean’s smug voice when he said

“I saw Bigfoot.”

Seth made a choked off noise. A second later he pressed his sweaty forehead against the side of Dean’s neck as Seth clenched tight all over, trembled as he came.

“I thought we talked about this, man.” Seth panted, his voice hoarse after he had rolled off of Dean and flopped over on his back.

It was hot all the time in Florida. Dean spent his days at FCW dripping sweat and his nights dreaming of a future where he would be able to afford a room with air conditioning.

“About me raw dogging you?” Dean tried to play dumb, but he was grinning too much to really pull it off. “Yeah, we did. No way you forgot already. I mean my jizz has to still be dripping out of - ouch!”

“Dean.” Seth snapped after he had elbowed Dean hard in the ribs. “I know you like to say weird shit during sex. But can you _please_ -”

There was enough of the constant city night light coming in through the blinds that it was easy to see. The glare of the sodium lamps in the parking lot and the hazy neon glow from the liquor store across the street threw bright light and long shadows across the inside of the room. Even in the middle of the night everything stood out in sharp relief.

So Seth noticed Dean’s leering grin right away, huffed out a breath and put his forearm over his face so that Dean couldn't see hin when he said “Can you _please_ not talk about Bigfoot when we're fucking?”

“Why? You don't think I'm lying, do you? You know I saw him.”

“Yes. I know you think that you saw something in the woods in Pennsylvania.” Seth said, very deliberate and slow. Really taking the time to pronounce every single letter. “But that does not mean that I want to be thinking about Bigfoot when I come.”

“Why not?”

“Seriously? No one wants to think about Bigfoot when they're getting fucked!”

“Except for you, apparently. Since you basically just ‘fessed up to thinking about Bigfoot when you came all over me.” Dean patted his messy stomach, waggled his eyebrows. “Ya damn weirdo.”

Seth groaned again, rolling over onto his front as if that would help him hide from Dean. He would want to leave soon, Dean knew. It was almost too hot to touch, but even more than that Dean knew he could get obnoxious after fucking and most people didn't like to stick around and have to deal with it. But he had a few tricks up his sleeve when it came to Seth.

Dean hurried to straddle the back of Seth's thighs, trapping him against the bed. The back of Seth's neck was dark red, and he hid his face down in his arms as Dean palmed the globes of his ass. Spread them apart so that he could look down at the core of him, pink and wet.

Seth squirmed underneath him, twisted one of his arms back to try and slap Dean’s hands away. Dean caught him around the wrist easy, pinned Seth's hand against the small of his back. Not trying to hurt Seth. Not cranking on his shoulder until he cried or anything, just holding it there. Firm.

“This okay?” Dean asked, voice low. He didn't sound nearly as unsure about it as he felt. Years of practice cutting promos meant that there was nothing in Dean’s voice to betray the nervous flutter in his chest.

In Dean’s experience, if someone was getting fucked or smacked around or held down in bed it was usually him. But it hadn't taken Dean long after starting _whatever_ this thing was with Seth for him to figure out that Seth liked it better the other way around. Which was fine. Dean was down for anything, really. He wouldn't complain. Dean just wasn't one hundred percent sure how to dish out what he was only used to taking, but he knew that he needed to figure it out quick. Before Seth got tired of waiting for Dean to get his shit together and bailed.

“Yeah.” Seth muttered, muffled into the pillow and he canted his hips up as much as he could under Dean’s weight.

“How mad are you gonna get if I talk about Mothman while I eat you out?” Dean asked.

He was ready for it when Seth started to thrash underneath him, still pinning Seth's wrist back as he struggled against Dean’s hoke. But Seth was laughing, not mad or frustrated with him anymore. Dean felt some of the pressure on his chest lift away.

This. Well, this and William Regal’s head on a pike. But mostly just -

If he could just have Seth like this and keep it good. Seth laughing underneath him right up until Dean shifted down and Seth started moaning, high and shocked, when Dean licked him open. If Dean could just have this one thing for himself and not mess it up, then he would be okay. Dean could try and stay stable, keep out of trouble, and Dean wouldn't care if he lived the rest of his life in stifling Florida motel rooms because it would all be worth it.

Then, two years down the line and everything that Dean had fought so hard for dissolved around him. One second they had all been together on top of the world. But in the blink of an eye the line snapped Dean was untethered. Lost in space, alone.

He wasn't sad though. Furious at himself for being so stupid, but not sad. Dean just had to get over himself and finally accept that this was the way his life had to be. If he had nothing left then at least there would be nothing else for them to take away.

Dean had spent the weeks after Seth's betrayal getting fucked up, blasted out of his mind, not even sure how he got between one venue and the next. He wasn't proud of himself for it, but he also didn't give a flying fuck. When Dean had thought about Seth standing next to those Authority fucks, smiling and resplendent in everything he had destroyed...Dean had gone way beyond simply seeing red. He just saw nothing. So he chased it.

Then Dean woke up in an Denny's.

That wasn't quite right. He hadn’t been asleep, so it couldn't say that he had woken up. One second Dean had known nothing, been nothing, and then in the next Dean realized that he was sitting upright in a booth with his mouth was hanging open. As far as Dean could tell he had been in the process of trying to guide a jagged hunk of pancake into his mouth when the fog of mixed substances receded and reality hit him like a slap in the face.

Had he come to the Denny's after a show? Was he supposed to be on his way to one, maybe? Dean was pretty sure that Money in the Bank hadn’t happened yet, but other than that... Dean didn't know what day of the week it was. He didn't know what city he was in. It was dark outside of the plate glass windows - there could have been mountains out there, or an ocean, or maybe miles and miles of flat nothingness. Dean had no idea. All he knew was that he could see the vaguely lit outline of what looked like an arena in the distance.

Letting his fork clatter back down onto the plate, Dean tried to look around the restaurant. He moved his whole head in a lazy arc and closed one of his eyes so that he could focus his vision a little bit better. Stark black and white checkerboard linoleum, red vinyl seats and benches, and did the lights really have to be that bright? Whoever invented Denny's should have insisted on dimmer switches. It was hard to imagine that anyone who found themselves there in the middle of the night (or the earliest hours of the morning, Dean wasn't sure) would really want to see everything about themselves under such a harsh and unforgiving glare.

Aside from Dean's own majestic presence, the Denny's was empty except for a couple of canoodling teenagers and an middle aged waitress, who was leaning on the counter next to the till and staring right at Dean. Dean blinked his eyes very slowly as the waitress made her way over. All of the lights all had smoky tracers coming off of them, smearing whenever Dean moved his head, and the waitress was leaving a wake of boiling air behind her like a heat mirage.

“You want to cash out?”

Dean looked down at his table. There were three or four empty coffee mugs alongside his plate, which still held some hashbrowns and half of a pancake. The pancake was swollen with blueberry syrup. At least Dean had figured out why his face felt so sticky. He considered the table in front of him for a few long, silent seconds before he squinted back up at the waitress.

“You've been trying to get that bite in your mouth for the past half hour.” she said, crossing her arms across her chest. “Figured you finally gave up on it. Time to go.”

It wasn't until she had set the white slip of the receipt down in front of him that Dean realized he was being ‘ _asked to leave_ ’ a Denny's. That was how far he had fallen.

Dean fished a couple of crumpled twenties out of his pocket and dropped them on the table, not able to look the waitress in the eyes after he had flinched at the sound when his chair scraped against the linoleum. Still trying to figure his shit out, not ready to go back into the world, Dean retreated to the bathroom. He stared at his own pinprick pupils in the mirror, had to restart four or five times when he tried to count to fifty to get himself under control. Dean realized that he hurt all over, sore and aching like he had been getting into fights, so at least he still had a job. Probably.

When he shrugged out of his leather jacket to check, Dean saw that he had a bunch of bruising on his ribs, new enough that it hadn't started to yellow yet. A big handprint on his right hip, curling up from under the waistband of his jeans. Dean had hoped that seeing the injuries might jog a memory, it usually did, but there was still nothing but a black cloud obscuring whatever Dean had done in the last couple of days. At least there weren't any track marks on his arms. Dean had been bad, maybe. Probably. But at least he hadn't been that bad.

Dean washed the sticky syrup off of his face and drank a few cupped palm fulls of water from the tap as he tried to figure out what he was going to do with himself.

Everything was business as usual when Dean left the bathroom. Then the bell over the door jangled. The waitress had been in the process of cleaning Dean’s table, and she took one step and then another and then she froze. It was if she had been turned to stone between one second and the next.

One of the teenagers in the booth nearby had his coffee cup halfway to his mouth, lips pursed as he blew on the surface.Even from a distance Dean could see a curl of steam rising from the dark surface. When Dean thought back on it later he realized that should have been his first clue that something had been very wrong. People could play at being statues, pretend to be frozen as some strange rib. But Dean didn't know of any way to make steam stay so perfectly still, a loose cloud of vapor that did not dissipate.

It was like the whole Denny's was frozen - except for Dean. Because Dean found that _he_ could move just fine. He could take a step forward. He could breathe. He could swivel his head around to the doorway and he could blink, stunned, when he saw Seth Rollins standing there. Rollins was wearing his ring gear, shirtless in just a pair of tight pants and boots, looking Dean right in the eye.

‘ _You're not gonna get a Grand Slam looking like that, asshole_ .’ was Dean’s first, ridiculous thought. ‘ _No shirt, no shoes, no service_.’

Seth was breathing hard, dripping sweat like he had just come out of the ring. They were well across the restaurant from each other, lots of tables in between them, but Dean could tell that Seth had something clenched up tight in his left fist. Maybe brass knuckles or a roll of quarters. That was much more Dean’s style that Seth's, but what the fuck did Dean know? Everything else about Seth had turned out to be a lie. Dean also thought that Seth looked a little flickery around the edges, even though the thought didn’t make any sense. All the lights still has tracers coming off of them too, so Dean was obviously still coming down from whatever he had taken.

The waitress and the teenagers were still frozen in time, trapped in amber waiting for the scientists to come and extract their blood to clone the dinosaurs. Wait, what? Fuck, Dean was losing the thread. He had to focus on what mattered - Rollins had come to kick Dean’s ass in a Denny's, and even though Dean was still pretty fucked up he was going to tear Seth apart. Screw saving it for the cameras.

Dean took a step towards Seth, already raising his fists, but then Seth moved and -

Dean had thought that Seth looked sort of flickery around the edges when the two-toned, two-timing son of a bitch had been standing still in the doorway. When Seth started striding towards Dean with that look of grim determination on his sweaty face, the flickering intensified until it felt like Dean was watching Seth on a tape recording, through bad tracking on a shitty VCR.

Dean could see Seth - his familiar face, the hard set of his jaw, the sweaty, tense line of his shoulders as he stalked around the tables. Yet there was something else in those visual stutters that bisected Seth, jagged lenses that showed where sections of the man had been cut away and filled back in with parts that didn't quite fit right.

 _‘I wish you were a werewolf so I could shoot you in the face!’_ a little girl yelled from somewhere deep in the recesses of Dean’s memory. That wasn't right, though. Dean didn't even believe in werewolves, but he knew that they were supposed to transform with the moon. Seth hadn’t _transformed_ into anything, much less a wolf.

Because Dean saw Seth himself, but Dean could also see the monster that had slid sideways into the man.

There were places where Seth's bones seemed to have switched directions, sloping off in twists of muscle that stretched and spasmed in bizarre ways that Dean’s brain could only classify as _wrong_. It was even worse when Seth turned to navigate around a table and Dean caught a glance of him from the side. Incongruous, hard to look at. Brighter, more colorful than Dean would have ever thought. Like an oil slick rainbow or a chemical spill, but still barbed and broken and dark.

Dean’s eyes caught on one particularly shocking transition where the curve of Seth's jaw switched abruptly from tan skin along the hinge of it into something else, as if a toddler had carelessly collaged the pieces together. Dean saw dripping, needle-like teeth that curved up from what looked like the raw exposed bone of a mandible much thicker than Seth's own.

Dean got a real good look at all of it because Seth had taken advantage of Dean's confusion. While his mental gears had been slipping and stripping teeth, Seth had stalked his way across the mostly empty Denny's and gotten right up in Dean’s face. Before Dean could even think to dodge Seth had backhanded him. Hard.

There had been a few seconds in there where Dean so totally failed to comprehend what he was seeing that he could have fooled himself into thinking that it was just another fucked up hallucination. The last hurrah of whatever it was he had taken as worked it's way out of his system. If Dean hadn't already known that was a lie, Seth's first hit would have obliterated that theory.

As it was, the smack had almost obliterated Dean’s fucking skull.

Dean got in fights for a living. He was good at it. After all, he had been practicing since way back when he was still knee high and pissing in his pants. It went without saying that Dean knew how to take a hit. But no matter his experience, Dean couldn't have anticipated how that simple slap from Seth knocked him halfway across the room.

He might have flown further, but the back of his leg caught against a chair and arrested his momentum, slamming him hard across the lip of a table. Stars exploded across Dean’s vision, blood dripping into his mouth and down his chin from where his lip had split. He rolled off and fell on his ass, jarring his tailbone and getting a little dizzy from the way that the lights streaked around him. That was just in his head, Dean knew. Too bad the rest of it wasn’t.

The heels of Dean’s boots skidded on the linoleum as he tried to scramble away and get back to his feet. When Dean grabbed the lip of the table to haul himself up it didn't so much as wobble. Even the damn salt and pepper shakers stayed perfectly lined up, as if he hadn't just crashed into them. The cheap furniture should have broken in a second under the weight of Dean’s impact, but even though Dean could touch it he couldn't seem to have any effect on it.

Okay, good to know. Seth was some kind of grotesque monster now, and he had trapped Dean in a frozen hell where every inanimate object was as solid and immovable as a concrete wall. Great. Really just perfect. But Dean didn't have any more time to lament his circumstances because Seth had caught up with him again.

Dean sort of blacked out the next time Seth hit him. So he missed the part where he tumbled over the table and skipped right to the bit where he was face down on the sticky floor. Seth was blocking him in up against a row of chairs, and when Dean pressed back against them they held just as firm as the other ones had. Trying to crawl through them would be stupid - Dean was too big of a guy to pull that off under normal circumstances, much less when all the furniture was immovable. He would end up getting trapped and tangled, pinned down, an easy target.

Seth crouched down to watch Dean, grinning and vicious. Dean saw that one of Seth’s eyes looked flat and glowing where it reflected the overhead lights. It was silvery white, like the eye shine of a deer that got caught in the headlights on a highway.

Dean spit at him, snarling obscenities, when Seth reached out to grab him with a hand that was half fingers and half curved talons. The jeans shredded into ribbons as Dean yanked his foot away, and there were deep furrows carved in the leather of his boots. Dean thought the part of Seth's face that was human enough to display emotions looked almost surprised. Like Seth hadn't thought Dean would put up a fight, had just assumed that he would just lay down and die.

When Seth moved to grab him again, Dean pistoned his leg back and kicked Seth in the face as hard as he could. The heel of his boot caught Seth right on the cheek. Dean expected to hear the crunch of bone, but it turned out that Seth's face was much harder than Dean remembered. Seth staggered back, fumbled when his calf bumped against an unmoving chair. His right hand went up to touch the place that Dean had kicked, but the left remained clenched tight around whatever it was that Seth held there. Dean could bet that whatever it was had to be pretty important.

“You fucker!” Seth yelled at Dean, the words coming out of his mouth in two voices. The nasally sneer that Dean was well accustomed to, underlaid by a deep stone grinding that sounded like a rockslide. “I'm going to -”

Dean had stopped listening, vaulted over the table and dashed towards the door. One good thing about the immovable obstacles, at least, was that he could get a good push off them instead of just falling on his clumsy ass.

Seth was stronger, more durable now than he had any right being, but it turned out that he wasn't any faster. Dean made it to the door and discovered to his mounting horror that it was just as frozen as the rest of the Denny's. Even when he slammed his entire weight against it the damn thing refused to budge. Dean considered throwing a chair into the glass, but then he remembered that he couldn't move those either.

As his mind tried to come up with something, anything, Dean heard Seth's coming up behind him. That time Dean managed to sidestep around Seth, punched him hard in the ribs even though Dean felt like it just did more damage to his knuckles than to Seth. He just needed some time, needed to come up with some way to get the hell out of there. But the adrenaline fueled blood racing through Dean’s veins pounded in his ears and it sounded like it was saying _no escape, no escape, no escape_.

Seth turned and tried to sweep Dean’s legs, snarling. Dean stumbled but didn't fall, backing up to put a little more distance between them. The next time that Seth lunged at him, Dean shifted his weight and leaned into it. All the air got knocked out of his lungs but Dean was close quarters again. His hands scrabbled along the inhuman patch of flickering flesh on Seth's forearm, and when Seth tried to yank away Dean grabbed Seth around the wrist of his clenched hand.

Startled, Seth faltered and that one moment was all Dean needed to solidify his grip. Then he yelled, hoarse and desperate, before he bit down hard on Seth's arm.

His teeth sunk in a couple of inches below the elbow, but it wasn't blood that flooded Dean’s mouth. Whatever it was that came dripping from Seth's skin was as thick as syrup and tasted a lot like caramel mixed with rotting meat. Dean coughed and choked and dug his teeth in further. He just hoped to fuck that it wasn't poisonous.

Seth was screaming, that terrible two-voiced roar of pain as he tried to shake Dean loose. Both of Dean’s hands were locked on around Seth's left wrist. So when Seth whipped his arm to the side he flung Dean with the same inhuman strength that Seth had hit him with before. As he threw Dean, Seth's grip on whatever it was that he was holding onto so tightly faltered. So when Dean’s hands slid down along Seth's loose fist he managed to grab what felt like a little scrap of rough cloth in the split second before he went flying.

Dean was airborne then, moving fast, and he saw that he was on a crash course directly towards one of the plate glass windows on the front of the restaurant. He didn't even have enough time to worry whether the window would break or if hitting it would be more like slamming into steel - Dean wasn't sure if it even really mattered. Either way it was going to hurt like a motherfucker. But then -

Then he hit the glass.

The thing about it was. The thing about it was that Dean couldn't have forgotten about anything about Seth in that Denny's even if Dean had wanted to. He had stalked Seth across the country as he tried to figure out why Seth never seemed any tougher in the ring. Why nothing like that had ever happened again, even when Dean would push Seth to his limits. Dean had burned out and given up eventually, of course. He couldn't figure it out and he started to believe that maybe he really had lost his mind that night. But even when Dean moved on he had never forgotten. Through it all, though, the one thing that Dean did his best to block out and not think about was what had happened when he hit that window.

It wasn't painful. Dean imagined that what happened to him next must have been what it felt like to be a book, flipped through by the careful finger of god. Cracked open and shuffled. Dean knew in his head that he was moving too fast for it to have been a methodical process, but in his heart it still felt like every millisecond that he spent flying through the window was an eternity. Atoms combing through each other, sliding and shivering and reforming.

Dean had felt the glass as it passed through every fiber of his being. It was much, much worse than any physical pain that he had ever known.

Then he was through, still flying full speed as he crashed shoulder first into the cracked asphalt of the parking lot. He was damn lucky that he hadn't broken anything. Dean had struggled to stand, dizzy, unsteady on his feet. When he looked up, the window was completely intact. Seth was standing on the other side of it, looking at Dean with a strange look of mixed fury and fear on his face. He looked completely human - no flickering monstrosity mixed in with the Seth that Dean had known ~~and loved~~ \- still dripping sweat but without the bite Dean knew he had gouged into Seth's arm.

As he watched through the window, life came back into the Denny's. The waitress shook her head as if she were shaking out some cobwebs, and the teenager took a sip of his steaming coffee while his girlfriend giggled. Then the waitress noticed Seth standing sweaty and shirtless in the restaurant, started yelling at him loud enough that Dean could hear it outside the building.

Dean spit, disgusting black ichor that shimmered wet against the parking lot. Then he ran.

He still had no idea where he was, but Dean had seen an arena in the distance and he knew that if he could just get there… Dean didn't actually know. He just figured that he would be safe if he found other people, or could try to hide out on someone's tour bus. He didn't have a lot of friends on the roster right now, but there had to be at least a couple guys who wouldn't  try to murder him on sight. Whatever. It didn’t do any good to plan too far ahead, better to stay flexible and roll with the changes.

Dean didn't even realize that he was still holding the piece of fabric that he had snatched from Seth until he had to slow down to catch his breath on the edge of the arena parking lot.

It didn’t seem special in any way, just a beige scrap of cotton that had been folded over a couple of times, wadded up tightly in the heat of his fist. Why the fuck had Seth even been holding it? Dean shook the scrap, not expecting the way that it seemed stuck together. When he peeled the sides if it apart he saw that the inside of the fabric was smeared with what looked like dark brown mud and clumps of hair.

  
Lip curled in disgust, Dean threw it on the ground and kept jogging. He didn't need one more nasty, cryptic thing to worry about. He had enough of that in his head already.


	3. Magpie

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional warnings: Referenced het sex and choking (consensual). Someone is restrained and threatened with torture (non-consensual).

Dean stretched slow and languorous as he got up from the bed, tried to work out some of the soreness in his back and thighs. “You wanna get some food?”

“Sure. I saw a Little Ceasars down the street on our way in.” Alexa said. She must have noticed the way Dean’s lip curled in involuntary disgust. “What?”

Alexa never seemed to give a fuck about where she stayed, what she ate.That had caught him off guard - at first Dean had been unsure if she really didn't care or if she was just busting his balls. Alexa had a talent for sounding simultaneously serious and sarcastic that made her a pain in the ass to figure out.

“That shit tastes like being poor.” Dean said, not entierly joking as he mocked disgust

“Don't get high maintenance on me now, Ambrose.” Alexa rolled her eyes. Dean couldn't see that she had, but he could sure as hell hear it in her voice. Alexa trailed her knuckles down his spine as she passed behind him, hummed an amused little noise at the way Dean shivered.

They had shacked up in one of those hotel rooms where the sink and the mirror were outside of the actual bathroom. When Dean looked back over his shoulder in the mirror, he could see that Alexa had perched on the edge of the tub wearing a pair of sweatpants and nothing else. She had a sparkly little makeup bag tipped open on the counter across from her, and she was clipping her toenails while Dean checked himself out in the mirror, poking at the bruises that she left on him.

Good thing they had a couple days off coming up. Dean figured that Shane McMahon wouldn't appreciate the his heavyweight champ showing up with a pretty purple necklace like the one that Dean was sporting. Then again, Shane was still a McMahon, so. No telling what type of shit that dude was into.

“How’d I know you’d be into some weird stuff?”

“Pfft. You don’t know me.”

Alexa had her tongue peeking out from between her teeth as she worked, and the sound of the little clippers was the only noise in the room for a couple of seconds. It was oddly trusting of her, more intimate than Dean would have expected and not even because of the partial nudity.

Dean had been waiting, trying to figure out a way to bring the whole thing up with Alexa. How to say _‘hey, do you happen to know anything about how time can sometimes stop in it’s tracks and then a monster that both does and does not look like your ex tries to murder you?_ ’ Somehow Dean just hadn’t managed to work that little nugget into a conversation yet. But all of a sudden here was his chance. Dean was never one to waste a perfect setup

“Nah, I know you.”

Alexa made another little scoff of disbelief, flexed her toes as she inspected her handiwork.

“I know that your family had a chicken coop in the back yard.” Dean continued, starting small. “I know you had an older brother named Micah.”

As Dean talked he watched Alexa in the mirror, waiting for some shock of surprise or recognition to cross her face. He had learned that she was amazingly, annoyingly tight lipped about herself. There was no way Dean could have known those things about her, but Alexa didn't seem rattled in the least. Her only response was to make a small noise of assent as she put her nail clippers away, then drew out a permanent marker and started coloring her fingernails with it.

Okay, so he had made Alexa regress to her Hot Topic phase. Not exactly the response he had been hoping for.

The next thing Dean said was a guess. He hadn’t known for sure, but it had to get some type of reaction one way or another. Whether Alexa just laughed at him or not would have to be his metric of success.

“I know you’ve killed a werewolf.”

When Alexa looked up her eyes locked onto Dean’s right away, and they stared at each other through the reflection in the mirror. Dean didn't know why his heart was beating so fast all of a sudden, the pace of it kicking up in his chest as smooth as a sports car shifting gears. Alexa didn't look surprised or angry or amused. Her face was just blank, set in stone.

She stopped coloring on her fingernails, and the Sharpie clattered and bounced against the tiled floor when she tossed it, skittering under the counter. Dean had a strong., sudden urge to apologize. Alexa was still holding his eyes in the mirror and Dean knew that he had misjudged his approach to this conversation very, very badly. But when he opened his mouth all that came was her name.

“Alexa -”

If Dean wouldn't have been watching her, he never would have noticed her approach. Dean took a deep breath to say something else and the smell of ozone tickled his nose. Before he could settle on words, she was close enough behind him that her breasts were almost brushing up against his back. Alexa reached out and touched Dean right at the base of his skull with the tip of her thumb. One second Dean could feel the short hairs bristling as she brushed them. Then she was touching him skin to skin. The blunt edge of her fingernail just started to dig into his flesh, and then.

Then Dean blacked out.

He woke up tied to a bed.

Dean's head wasn’t throbbing or feeling jagged inside the way that it normally did when someone had hit him hard to knock him unconscious. In fact, he didn't feel any worse than when he woke up from a nightmare in the early hours of the morning, cotton mouthed and groggy. But this was no regular nightmare. This was a very special type of trouble that Dean had gotten himself into.

There was thick nylon strapping wrapped around his wrists and ankles, holding him spreadeagled on top of the scratchy comforter. Dean was still able to feel his fingers and wiggle his toes but there wasn't much give to the bindings. Surprisingly, Dean hadn't been gagged. So there was nothing that muffled the increasingly annoyed sounds Dean made as he took stock of his situation. His hair was flopping down in front of his eyes, but Dean recognized the hotel room. It was the same one they had been in before Alexa knocked him out. Same ugly curtains and lackluster sailboat painting in the wall. Dean was naked except for his boxers, and the only other thing on him besides the straps was Alexa’s strange little keychain pendant.

When he craned his head down he could see it resting right at the bottom of his sternum. And then there was Alexa herself, sitting in one of the chairs with her feet kicked up on the table, facing Dean. There was a Little Ceasars box stuffed precariously in the garbage can next to Alexa, too big to really fit in the small bin, and Dean could see where the cheap grease of it had soaked through the cardboard. How long had he been unconscious?

Alexa had put on one of her old NXT sweatshirts, and she was staring back at him with hard eyes. Dean waited for her to say something. Anything. But Alexa just pinned him with the force of her silent inspection as she finished eating her last slice of pizza. Then she wiped her hands off on the chair. Alexa pushed the sleeves of her sweatshirt up to her elbows, snapped an elastic band off of her wrist and twisted her hair up behind her head, the red tips of it disappearing into a messy bun. It seemed like she hadn't blinked at all since Dean had locked eyes with her, hadn't so much as glanced away.

It only took her a couple of steps to walk over where she had tied Dean up, and Alexa stood to the side of the bed next to Dean’s head and stared down at him with her arms crossed over her chest. The first thing Dean’s brain thought to catalog was that her sweatpants rode low enough on her hips that it looked like she still wasn't wearing underwear. The second thing was that Alexa looked angrier than he had ever seen her before.

“Red.” Dean broke the silence

“What?”

“That’s my safeword.”

He didn't think for a second that kinky sex was what Alexa had in mind. Dean just desperately wanted to defuse some of the tension in the room. He smiled at her, trying to look goofy and nonthreatening instead of scared

“Okay.” Alexa said. “I don’t give a fuck.”

Alexa’s words were dripping with venom, and her lip curled up in a sneer as she looked down on him like he was the worst piece of shit on the planet. Dean's mouth snapped shut.

“You can scream it as loud as you want.” Alexa continued, as she reached into the pocket of her baggy sweatpants and pulled out a heavy orange boxcutter. “Or you can save your energy.”

It wasn't until Dean saw the blade click out, sectioned metal catching the light from the bedside lamp,  that the terror settled in and he really started to panic. He thought about how Alexa had tied her hair back, the way she had pushed up her sleeves like she was about to get down to work and didn’t want anything getting in the way. He thought about the vulnerable expanse of his abdomen, the way that he was tied so tightly that he couldn’t even curl up to protect himself. Dean tugged harder against the straps but nothing budged.

The thing was, Dean had been in bad scrapes before. Incidents where he was on the wrong side of someone with murder on their mind. And he had been in other situations where he had been physically defenseless. But he could never recall having been in a position where both of those variables were so terrifyingly combined.

“Hey, hey, hey. Alexa, I -” Dean’s voice was coarse, scared as he pressed himself down into the bed as hard as he could to try and gain even one extra millimeter of grace. He tried not to get distracted by the fact that she didn't even seem worried about him making noise. “I'm. Listen. Sorry, I-”

“You're not one of them, so I'm giving you an opportunity here. Dean. _Dean_.” Alexa snapped and he realized that he had been starting to hyperventilate. She gave him a chance to get his breathing under control, to think, think, think about how he was going to get out of this. “Dean. You're going to tell me how you know about me. How did you know that I’ve killed werew-”

“I didn’t!”

“What?” Well _that_ seemed to bring her up short. Alexa’s firm, grim expression wavered for the first time since Dean had woken up.

“It was a guess! Just a guess. No need to get stabby.”

Alexa didn't thaw any more, so Dean just talked. He started at the beginning. How he had met her as a child, how she had snuck into his room in the middle of the night to make sure he wasn't weird. He told her about how he had seen Bigfoot, even though she told him that Bigfoot wasn't relevant. Bigfoot was always relevant, Dean insisted, and by that point she had put the knife back in her pocket and untied him.

Dean sat up, drank a glass of water and put some clothes on, and then he told Alexa about what had happened with Seth in the Denny's. The way that everything had frozen, how Seth had looked when he moved. Dean even explained, haltingly, about how he had escaped. How he had gone _through_ the window after he had snatched Seth's nasty jizz rag.

“It smelled like semen?” Alexa asked. She had seemed perturbed through most of Dean’s account of the Denny's incident, but that was what got her finally asking questions?

“Gross. No. Why would you even ask that?”

“You just called it, and I quote, ‘Rollins’ nasty jizz rag’.”

Dean laughed. “Nah, I was just joking about that.”

“Did it smell like anything?” Alexa asked. Dean was caught flat footed and had to think back for a second.

“Just mud.” He said finally. “Mud and metal, but I had a lot of blood on my face. And I told you there was hair in it, right?”

“Yeah.”

They were quiet for a while, Dean sitting cross legged on the bed with his back to the headboard and Alexa kneeling in front of him. Alexa was rubbing one of Dean’s hands in what he knew was a nonverbal apology for tying him up and threatening to torture him. Dean still felt a little hollowed out in the wake of the terror and adrenaline, so the hand rub was nice but he also wanted to tell her that it was okay. She hadn't bound him too tight, she hadn't actually hurt him, he was fine. Fine, fine, fine.

But Dean didn’t say anything, and eventually Alexa asked

“How did you put those things together?”

“Huh?”

“Remembering you met me as a kid and whatever happened with Rollins.”

“Umm,” Dean shrugged, trailed off, not sure how to explain it. “It’s all weird ain’t it? I dunno, it just. Seeing your keychain thing. The way your family freaked when you started talking about killing your brother if he was a werewolf. Knowing that I saw what I saw even if it doesn't make sense and no one believed me.”

“ _Wait_. Who else have you told?”

“Just Roman.” Dean said “And he thought I had just hallucinated. ‘Specially since he knew how fucked up I'd been getting.”

Alexa didn’t seem completely satisfied with that, but at least it seemed like she accepted it. She dug one of her thumbs into a tight spot on the palm of his hand and Dean shivered.

“That hurt?”

“Nah, just sensitive.” Dean muttered, then “I gotta ask. How did you know I wasn't. You know. A werewolf or some shit like that?”

Alexa let go of his hand and retrieved the disk of her keychain from where it had been sitting on the nightstand, pinched it between two of her fingers held it up between them. “You didn't start screaming when I put this on you.”

“You should get a new one.” Dean looked away, down at his knees where he had crossed his legs in front of himself. “That glass part’s been broke for what? Twenty years?”

When Dean glanced back up Alexa was just staring at him with one eyebrow raised.

“What?” He nudged at her with his foot. Gentle. Careful in a way that he remembered from when he had been small. “Don't look at me like you're The Rock.”

“I thought you-” Alexa broke off, shook her head. “They all look like this. It's not broken, it's like that because it has water inclusions.”

“Holy water?” Dean had been joking, but he found that he wasn't surprised by Alexa’s response.

“Got it in one.” She leaned over, set the quartered disk back down on the nightstand. “I think it was... must have been a couple kids after you? My parents caught on to what I was up to and made me go live next door with my Aunt for a while. She didn’t take temps, so I wasn’t always almost blowing cover.”  

“Why didn’t your fucked up monster hunting family, I dunno, maybe wait a while to tell you that shit?” Dean asked. “You were a tiny little kid. I mean, not that you ever got much bigger. But still.”

Alexa slapped his knee, and Dean didn't flinch. He just held out his hand so that she would rub it again, would touch him some more. She took it easily, fingers skimming over the soft skin on the underside of Dean's wrist, but her eyes looked hard and far away for a second.

“Had to be ready. Children wouldn’t be spared in an attack - I could have taken a few of them out with me. Anyone can fight if they’re brave enough” The way that she spoke, Dean could tell that it was something Alexa had heard, maybe even said, plenty of times before. Something that had been ingrained.

“Well that’s kinda fuckin’ dark.”

Alexa’s mouth twitched into a small smile. “It is what it is.”

“What weird shit were you even worried about so bad? Werewolves and vampires?”

“Among other things. Yeah”

“Like what?”

“I’m not getting started. We’d be here all goddamn night.” Alexa griped, and it was a lot easier to think about how cute she looked when she was grumpy than to dwell on the fact that she had basically just confirmed to Dean that the world was full of monsters.

“Baby, you know I wanna be with you all night anyways.”

Dean waggled his eyebrows at her, trying to look lecherous, tomake her laugh. Instead, Alexa shut down and stared at him. Dean wasn’t sure what he'd said wrong - she’d never had any problem with his crude sense of humor before.

“We shouldn't mess around anymore.” She said, firm and final

“Um.” They had only hooked up, like, three times - it wasn't like she could be breaking up with him. But Dean still had that sick feeling creeping into his stomach, the one that came with knowing he had done something wrong and fucked up an otherwise good thing.  “Why?”

“Maybe because I just knocked you out and threatened to torture you for information.” Alexa didn't sound proud of herself, but she didn't sound particularly bothered by it either.

“Well, you could just apologize.”

“Dean.”

“What.”

“That’s fucked up. You've got to know that's fucked up, right?”

Dean shrugged. “Nothing you did actually hurt me, even when you hit me in the head. And I assumed you were into some weird shit when we started screwing, so I ain't completely surprised.”

“Was that _why_ we started fucking?” Alexa zeroed in on it right away, but she didn’t seem bothered by it. Just curious.

“Yes.” Dean said. Then “No. What the fuck. Why are we even talking about this? Weren't we supposed to be talking about how former champion and huge dickface Seth Rollins is also some kind of fucked up manbeast?”

Alexa made a small noise of assent. Dean didn’t think he would get away with it forever, but he was a long time master of derailing conversations that he didn’t like the direction of.

“Manbeast, get it? Rhyno’s gonna be pissed when he hears Seth is snatching his gimmick.”

“Yeah, I got it.” She rolled her eyes “The problem is, I don’t know for sure what Seth could be.”

“Aren’t you the expert on all this?” Dean asked. “C’mon Alex Trebek. _What is_ Seth Rollins?”

“Well then this is some second round, double Jeopardy type shit.” Alexa glared at him. “You realize that this is way in the deep end, right?”

“Can’t be that deep. He only did it the one time.”

“This information you’re giving me doesn't exactly line up nice and neat.” Alexa had stopped rubbing Dean’s hand and crossed her arms over her chest, looking deep in frustrated thought. “Before he broke up the SHIELD, did Rollins ever disappear for long stretches of time? Did he have any weird eating habits?”

“Nah. Only if you count his gross ass protein shakes. Seth never seemed the type for supernatural bullshit. I mean, I don’t think he ever even really believed me about Bigfoot.”

“Imagine that.” she deadpanned.

Alexa pulled the tie out of her hair, letting it fall down loose across her shoulders before she twisted it back up. Then she did it again. And again. Dean knew a nervous tic when he saw one.

“Whatcha thinking?”

“That I’ve already told you way too much about all this.”

“Well you could always hit me in the head again and hope you knock me hard enough to scramble the past couple hours.” Dean suggested, joking. Alexa’s eyebrows scrunched together at that, and Dean couldn’t tell if she thought he had said something stupid or if she was seriously considering the option. “Kidding! You know I’m kidding, right? Don’t concuss me. Champ’s gotta defend the title.”

Then Dean remembered then, for the first time in a little while, that Alexa had basically admitted to him that she had killed.

Alexa came from a family that, from what little Dean had been able to gather, had no qualms about murder. As long as it was under the appropriate circumstances. Sure she had just said werewolves, but. Were they people? Dean suddenly didn't know what to think. It wasn’t like Dean was an expert on stuff like that. Even if the ~~people~~ things she had killed weren’t completely human, Dean still had to wonder if they had felt fear.

“Don’t kill him, okay?” Dean hadn’t realized that he was going to say it until the words were already out of his mouth.

Alexa whipped her head around to stare at him. “Who?”

“Seth.”

“I’m not going to kill Seth Rollins.” She rolled her eyes. “Baron Corbin’s still walking around, isn’t he.”

“Corbin? Is he -”

“What do you think? But don’t worry. Corbin knows he needs to be afraid of me.”

“And what about me?”

“What _about_ you?” Alexa shot back, snide like she was trash talking someone in the ring.

“Do I need to be afraid of you?”

“Everyone needs to be afraid of me.” She puffed out her chest, slipping further into promo mode.

“For sure. You're as mean as fifty pounds of possums in a ten pound sack.”

Alexa managed to stare him down for another couple seconds before she dissolved into helpless laughter.

“What the fuck?” she asked, wiping tears from the corners of her eyes “Fifty pounds of possums, Jesus Christ. Where did you even get that?”

“Wyatt, probably.”

They didn't talk about the weird stuff any more until the next afternoon. Alexa was sitting cross legged in the passenger seat as she dug through the paper sack from Taco Bell, when out of nowhere she reached out her other hand to flip off the radio.

“You said you got his blood in your mouth, right?”

It took Dean an honest minute and a half to figure out what the hell she was talking about. “Yeah. Dunno if I'd call it blood though.”

“Whatever. Did you swallow any of it?”

“Don’t know. A little on accident, maybe.”

Alexa just hummed under her breath as she unwrapped her taco, swearing when she got the paper peeled back. “Fucking - I told them no lettuce, didn't I?”

It was like that the entire drive. Alexa would ferret out whatever scrap of information she had been searching for and then change the subject like it was nothing.

“Did you ever see him go swimming?”

“Who?”

“Seth.” She replied, and then, “ _After_ the breakup.”

“Fuck, I don’t know.” Dean looked out the window, watching the scrubby trees in the ditch fly by as he had merged around a little hatchback with a bunch of luggage strapped to the roof. “I might have seen him stewing in a hotel hot tub with J and J once. But I didn't stick around to see if he did laps.”

After that, Alexa paid no more or less attention to Dean than she had before. They hung out sometimes and rode together on occasion, alone or with others. It wasn't like they had ever been joined at the hip to start with. And Alexa stuck to her guns on not hooking up anymore, brushing off all of Dean’s advances, so. It was easy enough to pretend that nothing had ever happened. Dean wanted to press her, to ask more questions about all of the things that Alexa had alluded to, but every time he tried his words failed him. He just hoped that the answers would come to him in time.

“I called some people.” Alexa dropped down into the seat next to Dean at catering.

“Are you getting a title shot?” Dean swallowed and leaned back in his chair, grinning. “Nice.”

“What? No. About the other thing.” Alexa stabbed a couple of green beans on her fork, shoveled them into her mouth.

It was still early - Dean liked to get in and out of the chow line before there were a bunch of people crowding and watching him eat. Heath Slater was bothering Rhyno a couple tables over and a few of the camera guys were shooting the shit, but other than that the place was empty. No one was listening to them.

“And?”

“ _And_ I was told to stop digging into it. Not our problem.”

“Really?” Dean asked, incredulous. "You're just gonna give up that easy?"

“It might have been different if I would’ve got called up before the split.” Alexa was just looking at him, calm even though Dean was starting to boil inside. “Whatever Seth is, he’s not an immediate threat right now.”

“Says you.” Dean grit out, staring down at his plate even though he wasn’t hungry anymore. “How can you know that if you don’t even know what he -”

“In two years, you couldn’t figure it out and now all of a sudden you’re pissed?” Alexa didn’t laugh at him outright, but he could tell from her tone of voice that she was amused. Not one ounce of sympathy in her. “Sorry you got your hopes up. Get over it.”

Dean shoveled down the rest of the food on his plate, tasting nothing. He didn't lose his match that night but it was a close thing, and Dean knew every eye in the locker room was on him as he stormed out of the building.

Get over it. Like it was just that easy. Except - Dean hated that she kind of had a point. Everyone in their industry knew that strange shit existed. It seemed like half the roster was rumored to have some weird ability. Hell, the fans talked about it like it was all common knowledge. It was simple enough to pretend that sort of stuff didn't exist, to not think about it too hard as long as Kane wasn't, like, teleporting into the ring right next to you. They all just had to cope with knowing that there were things they couldn’t understand. There was just nothing that could be done about it.

That night, alone in his big hotel room, Dean stared at the ceiling and remembered back when he and Seth and Roman had all bunked together - inseparable, unstoppable. He remembered Alexa, pulling a blade on him and matter of factly threatening to cut Dean until he talked. But most of all Dean remembered how something that was mostly but not entirely Seth Rollins had warped reality and tried to kill him.

  
Dean had never been an expert in letting things go.

**Author's Note:**

> I write and edit everything on a smartphone, so if you see any particularly terrible mistakes just let me know. All of your kudos and comments give me life, I am not even kidding all of you make my day every day!
> 
> [tumblr ](http://www.bingitoff.Tumblr.com)


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